IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 9: Protected

I didn't come down for dinner.

I told myself it was because I wasn't hungry, which was partially true. The rest of the truth was that I had spent the last two hours sitting on the edge of a bed that was becoming mine in the slow, reluctant way that things become yours when you don't have a choice, and I was not ready to sit across a table from Luca Wolfe and pretend that the conversation we'd just had in that hallway hadn't rearranged something inside me that I didn't know how to put back.

I was not in love with him.

I was standing at the edge of something that looked, from certain angles, in certain light, disturbingly like the beginning of it. And the difference between those two things was becoming harder to hold onto with every day I spent in this house.

There was a knock at the door. One knock, because Luca only ever knocked once, and then it opened anyway.

I did not look up from the window.

"You need to eat," he said.

"People keep telling me that today."

He set something on the nightstand. I looked sideways. A plate. Rice and something that smelled like it had taken actual effort, which was interesting because the Luca Wolfe I had met four months ago in a crowded room had not struck me as someone who cooked.

"Sit," he said.

"I am sitting."

"At the table. Not on the edge of the bed like you're waiting for a bus."

I looked at him then. He was standing near the door with his hands in his pockets and his sleeves rolled up and the particular expression he wore when he was doing something he considered practical and was not going to discuss the emotional dimensions of.

I moved to the small table near the window. He brought the plate over and sat across from me and I ate and he watched in the way he watched everything, with the kind of attention that made you feel like the only thing in the room.

"Tell me the truth," I said, between bites. "Not the version where you give me enough information to keep me from panicking. The real version."

He looked at me for a moment. "About what specifically?"

"About how dangerous this actually is. About what it means that my name is on a list somewhere. About what happens when Don Adriano gets here and decides what my children's futures look like." I set my fork down. "I am carrying two people in my body, Luca. I deserve to know what world they are being born into."

The room was quiet for a moment. Outside the compound walls, somewhere in the distance, a car passed on the road and the sound faded and the quiet came back.

"The threat on your name," he said finally, "came from a rival family. The Ferrano syndicate. They have been looking for leverage against me for two years. You are leverage." He said it plainly, without softening it, because he knew by now that I preferred the plain version. "The twins are leverage. That is the reality."

"So what do we do about it?"

"I am doing things about it. Have been since before you arrived." He paused. "There is a team watching this compound at all times. There are people positioned at the approaches to this road. There are measures in place that you don't see because you are not supposed to see them. That is how it works when it is working correctly."

"And when it stops working correctly?"

"It won't."

"You can't promise that."

"No," he agreed. "I can't. But I can tell you that every person on my payroll understands what is at stake and what happens to them if they fail at it." His eyes were level with mine, completely steady. "Nobody in my world fails at something twice."

I sat with that. With the quiet violence of it, the way he had said it so matter of factly, like consequences were just weather. Another thing about this life that should have frightened me more than it did.

"And Don Adriano," I said. "When he comes. What does he actually want from me?"

"He wants to understand what you are," Luca said. "Who you are. Whether you are a problem or an asset. That is how he categorises people and he will categorise you whether we give him the opportunity to do it properly or not. I would rather you meet him on your terms than have him decide about you from a distance."

"His terms and my terms don't sound like the same thing."

"They're not. But you are more capable of holding your own than you think you are."

I looked at him. At the certainty in it. The way he had said it without qualifying it, without the performance of reassurance, just stated it like a fact he had already established and was informing me of.

"How do you know that," I said.

He held my gaze. "Because you've been holding your own since the moment I walked into your dormitory hallway and your first instinct was not to run but to manage the situation. You sent Bryan downstairs. You kept your voice steady. You have been in my house for days now and you have not fallen apart once." A pause. "You've cried. That's different from falling apart."

I did not know what to do with being observed that carefully. I looked at my plate for a moment and then back at him.

"The night you showed up," I said carefully, "when you told Bryan about the twins. You didn't have to do it the way you did. You could have been worse about it."

He said nothing.

"I'm not saying you were good about it," I continued. "But you could have been worse. And you weren't. And I've been thinking about that."

Still nothing. Just watching.

"Why," I said. "Why do it that way. Why let me say goodbye to him through the intercom. Why let Maya and my mom come today. Why..." I stopped. Looked at him directly. "Why are you not worse."

The silence that followed was different from his other silences. Something shifted in it.

"Because you are not a problem to be managed," he said eventually. "You are the mother of my children. And the way I treat you is the way they will learn that women are treated." He said it simply, without weight or drama. "I decided that a long time ago, before I knew you were going to be in this specific situation."

The plate in front of me had gone slightly blurry. I blinked.

"That is either the most unexpectedly decent thing you have ever said," I told him, "or a very sophisticated way of making sure I cooperate with your plans."

"Can't it be both," he said.

And there it was again. That thing that was not quite a smile but lived in the same neighbourhood. I had been cataloguing them without meaning to, the near smiles, the moments where something almost broke the surface and there were more of them than I had expected when I first arrived in this house with my life in a duffel bag and absolutely no idea what I was walking into.

I finished eating. He took the plate without being asked and I sat at the small table and watched him and thought about Maya sitting in my kitchen earlier today saying don't let him make you someone I don't recognise, and I tried to locate the version of myself that might be in danger of getting lost in here, tried to find the edges of it.

What I found instead was that I felt more like myself in this moment than I had in days. Which was confusing and inconvenient and probably something I needed to think about at a time when I had more emotional resources available.

"I want to be able to call my mom," I said. "Without wondering if someone is listening."

"Your phone is secure." He said it without turning around from where he was by the door. "Has been since the night you arrived."

I stared at his back. "You secured my phone without telling me."

"I secured your phone without frightening you," he said. "There's a difference."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Decided that argument was for another day and that right now I was going to take the win of having a secure phone and deal with the privacy implications of it later.

"What about going outside," I said. "I feel like the compound is getting smaller."

He turned around then. Looked at me properly. "Not yet."

"Luca..."

"The threat is active. The Ferrano family knows your name. Until I have resolved that in a way I am confident about, you do not leave this compound." He said it firmly but not unkindly. "I know that's not what you want to hear."

"It's really not."

"I know."

We looked at each other across the room. And I thought about the fight we'd had an hour ago, about me saying just quit and him saying there is no just and both of us standing in a hallway that was too small for the size of what we were trying to say, and how we had come from that to this, two people sitting in a room, eating food he'd cooked, having a conversation that was the most honest either of us had managed since the beginning.

"For what it's worth," I said quietly, "I understand more than I did this morning. About why you can't leave. About what it would cost." I paused. "I don't like it. But I understand it."

He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face that I was starting to recognise, the thing underneath the composure, the thing that had no name yet.

"That's worth a lot," he said.

He moved toward the door. Stopped with his hand on the frame, which was becoming a habit of people in my life, stopping at doors with things left to say.

"Sleep," he said. "The doctor is coming tomorrow."

"You're very bossy for someone who just told me he respects me."

"I respect you and I'm bossy," he said. "Those aren't mutually exclusive either."

And then he was gone. The door closed behind him, not locked this time, and I sat in the quiet of a room that was beginning to feel like somewhere I could breathe and thought about what he had said and what he hadn't said and what I was beginning to feel in the spaces between those two things.

I reached for my phone.

Not to call Bryan. Not yet. Just to hold it and know it was secure and feel, for the first time since two pink lines on a test, something that was adjacent to safe.

Then the screen lit up in my hand.

Bryan.

His name on the screen, familiar as breathing, carrying six years of everything I already knew about love and what it felt like when it was uncomplicated and clean and certain.

I stared at it for three rings.

Then I looked at the door Luca had just walked through.

Then I answered.